Originally Posted by
Trip7
Many are using the optimizer as a scapegoat. IMO it's overblown. The main reason for the degradation in trips are a lethal combination of poor staffing, RJ flying upgauging to Mainline, and reduction of fleet mix/fleet simplification caused by retirement of 88, parking of many 717s. Many 737/320/7ER pilots are simply not used to operating the amount of legs we do now. Heck even the 717 back in the day with a LAX base had very nice trips with no more than 3 legs a day. When the plane was moved back east the schedules turned the jet into CRJ200 2.0.
It's a shock factor. Folks need to get used to it because it's not going to get better anytime soon as the Regionals collapse. Take your time, wind the clock, you're too tired to fly, call in fatigued.
Sent from my SM-S908U using Tapatalk
Bingo! The optimizer amounts to a 1 or 2% change in system wide credit. We once did much of the RJ flying in-house with the DC9, 737-200 and even the 727. 4 legs was often the norm. The biggest difference from then to now is we get paid a lot more hours for similar trips. I have posted this before but when we had lots of trips like this there were complaints about the trip quality. The company said your welcome to try and do better. We tried for a few weeks and finally said never mind!
Another thing not mentioned that has also had a impact. Every time we get a contractual improvement it will effect rotation construction. As we attempt to drive the rotation construction to higher time trips and fewer days worked rotation quality will decrease. We once had decent 3 and 4 day trips but very short layovers. Often 9 hours from block in to block out. We demanded and got 8 hours behind the door and eventually the current rules. The company could no longer reliably schedule crews into out stations at night and back out in the morning. The result was 30 hour layovers. We hated the poor pay on trips with 30 hour layovers so we demanded and got a daily minimum. This forces the company to really have to pack the flying in around the long layovers or pay a severe credit penalty.